America’s Unlikeliest Bespoke Tailor Lives on an Island in Midcoast Maine
Duane MacLeod is a man who likes to work with his hands. Over the course of the 71-year-old’s life, he’s built a home, a sailboat—and now, as he enters his eighth decade—bespoke suits.
“I’ve always been a maker sort of person,” says MacLeod, who earlier this year established Hold Fast Bespoke. The operation is the culmination of a journey that began 12 years ago, when the New Hampshire native began making his own clothing.
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“Making clothes was just another kind of making exercise, and you just build up your skill set,” MacLeod says of his road to bespoke. “And I think anybody who does that, eventually you’re going to want to tackle a tailored jacket. It just seems like the goal that you’re going to head towards.”
It’s an ambition MacLeod was able to dedicate himself to fully starting in 2022, when he retired from a career in healthcare and enrolled at the Tailoring Academy in Macclesfield, England, an accredited institution established in 2018 by the UK Fashion and Textiles Association and the Savile Row Bespoke Association. Over the next 10 months, MacLeod learned how to draft patterns and sew complex garments by hand as part of the school’s first class of international students beside four other Americans and one French citizen.
By the time he returned to the US, MacLeod had learned to make a bespoke jacket from scratch using traditional tailoring materials like horsehair canvas and domette. But his home base of the last 40 years—the Midcoast Maine community of Georgetown, an island town with a little more than 1,000 residents—was a long way from Savile Row. Undaunted, he went about converting the upstairs room of his century-old summer cottage from bunk beds to a tailor’s workshop, complete with an eight-foot long cutting table covered in wool felt and an antique Singer sewing machine fished out of a nearby town dump by a friend.
Looking for exposure, MacLeod gathered some of the best garments he’d made and strode into David Wood, a longtime men’s store on the Portland waterfront. After a convivial meeting with its owner, MacLeod agreed to make a raglan-sleeved overcoat from a rust-colored Holland & Sherry Donegal tweed in a standard size 42 that would be sold at the store. After the coat sold in a matter of weeks, David Wood tapped MacLeod to make another, this time from a blue Holland & Sherry tweed with a rain-resistant treatment.
Since that initial exposure, MacLeod has earned his first few bespoke commissions (aided by his Instagram presence as @mainelymenswear), which have included a jacket made from a sparkly rainbow bouclé with iridescent glass buttons, and a tuxedo commissioned by a female client for her daughter’s wedding. While the above demonstrates that he’s not afraid of thinking outside the box, MacLeod describes his cut as traditionally English in nature, with a strong, roped shoulder and defined waist. He’s also enthusiastic about tweeds—a preference that fits neatly with the Maine climate.
Jackets from Hold Fast Bespoke begin at about $3,200, with accompanying trousers at $1,350. MacLeod utilizes a nearby co-working space in Bath to meet his clients and has also been offered the use of David Wood’s premises on Sundays and Mondays, when the retailer is closed. He strives to meet each client for three fittings, and complete commissions in sixteen weeks.
Learning to become a bespoke tailor—and then launch your own business—is not easy at any age, and speaks to MacLeod’s hunger to keep his hands busy after hanging up his 9-to-5. However unlikely this second career may be, it seems in keeping with his character, as revealed by his thoughts on the sailboat he built over the course of four years and later sold.
“It’s gone, but the real joy was all in the process of doing it,” he says. “And it’s the same with tailoring. The joy for me is all in the making and the process. It’s just how I’m wired.”
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